Looking to replace my station building

[rovex]

I suspect your Much Wenlock drawings come from this book.

Assuming the drawings haven't been enlarged or shrunk there are drawn at 2mm:1ft

[AyJay]

Well the mystery deepens, Rovex.

Yes, the photocopies are 2mm scale, but I have never owned that book.

I suppose it is possible that more than one book contains the same drawings. I’ll add this one to my wanted list.

Thank you

[Nick Holliday]

On 27/12/2023 at 09:14, AyJay said:

Nick.  Thank you, yes I have just seen your PM's.  I did a search around and discovered that my copy of the Vivien Thompson book was saved from the charity shop clear-out that I did some time back, so I do have the drawings for Wokingham.  I do also have photocopies of drawings for Much Wenlock and Wateringbury, both of them I am drawn to and I think I may choose one of them. However, the problem is that I don't know which books they came from and I don't think that the photocopies are 1:1 scale. So can you indicate which is which please?

 

I'm banned from doing anything creative (i.e. messy) in the house now, freshly redecorated and new carpets throughout.  So any work will have to wait until the spring, when I can get back to surviving more than 5min's at a go in my shed.  My first stage in making a model is normally to do a quick mock-up out of cereal-box cardboard, just to see what it looks like.

 

As @rovex has suggested, the first Chris Leigh book contains the Much Wenlock drawings, accompanied by a good selection of photos.  Your copy may have come from Model Railway Constructor, in which Chris described in detail his creation of a 4mm model of that station.  Regarding the drawings I sent to you, @AyJay, if you try to save them to your hard drive, you should see that the filename has the author's initials and the name of the station.  Wateringbury is in John Minnis's SECR book.

As for scales, you are, admittedly, rather at the mercy of a number of factors - hopefully the author has prepared the drawing as accurately as he could, but there is no guarantee the publishers have actually reduced them to scale to fit the book format, which usually results in the drawings being reproduced at 2mm to the foot, but mistakes have happened, and then, in the scanning/copying process there is the potential for more distortion, compounded by the printing process, when there is no guarantee that 100% actually means that! I tend to import a scanned drawing into, dare I say it, PowerPoint (other drawing packages are available) and then, using known dimensions, enlarge or reduce the drawing to the matching size.  I then export it as a PDF as my printer seems happier with scaling PDF's, and there are usually a couple of draft runs until I get the printed output to match the drawing. I am glad you propose to create simple mock-ups, as I am sure that will make it easier to decide what fits best.  I quite like playing around with the image to provide a bit of colour, and a more realistic image, which can be stuck to your cardboard, which does save having to mark out the building outline.  A few minutes work on a drawing from the John Minnis book produced this image. 

As can be seen, this drawing has a scale bar, which makes the correct scaling simple.  For those that don't have such a bar, or any dimensions that can be used, it may be a matter of trusting the printed drawing, and taking a measurement from the original, or finding the footprint using NLS georeferenced maps or other sources which provide a method of measurement.  For the record, the drawings for Much Wenlock measure 214mm for the overall frontage, which wold be 428mm in 4mm, or 107 feet overall.  Wateringbury's drawings, unfortunately, have been printed across two pages, and it is not possible to provide an overall measurement, because of the binding margin , but the tallest chimney measures, from platform level, 87mm on the 2mm drawing, so it should be 174mm high in 4mm. (The overall length is approximately 260mm at 2mm or 130 feet, if all the smaller ancillary buildings are included)

[AyJay]

Thanks for all that Nick.  It had never occurred to me to print out the views and paste them onto a mock-up, a bit better than cereal-box grey.  I just need to persuade my old printer to talk to my new laptop (Oh the trials of keeping ones technology up-to-date!)

 

I have taken another look at the drawings you posted me and after measuring how much space that I have to play with, I think that Adisham, Groombridge and Hellingly will be too big (long) for the available space without serious reworking.  Pewsey is pretty, but I really wanted something a bit bigger and more imposing.  So that leaves Lingfield to add to the short list.

 

Coming back to Wateringbury....  It's a bit worrying that I only have the front and rear views as drawings;  does that mean that there were no end-view drawings available?  I have been searching around for the John Minnis book, South East & Chatham Railway;  Amazon has a copy, but at a much higher price than I am willing to pay. There is no sign of it in Oxfordshire Libraries or the Oxfam website.  I'm reluctant to go for the copy found on ebay, in case the book does not have the views I lack.

[AyJay]

Bingo!

A further search on the internet revealed a website 'archive.org' that has a copy of the John Minnis book.

Logging in, I was able to check out the book and it does indeed have the end views of Wateringbury.

So I took copies of the pages I needed, attached. What is missing is a plan view.  So my next step will be to dig out my printer and look into how I get them working together.    Assuming I can get printouts, I will then look them over closely and see If I can produce a plan view from what the four side views tell me.

[Nick Holliday]

7 hours ago, AyJay said:

Thanks for all that Nick.  It had never occurred to me to print out the views and paste them onto a mock-up, a bit better than cereal-box grey.  I just need to persuade my old printer to talk to my new laptop (Oh the trials of keeping ones technology up-to-date!)

 

I have taken another look at the drawings you posted me and after measuring how much space that I have to play with, I think that Adisham, Groombridge and Hellingly will be too big (long) for the available space without serious reworking.  Pewsey is pretty, but I really wanted something a bit bigger and more imposing.  So that leaves Lingfield to add to the short list.

 

Coming back to Wateringbury....  It's a bit worrying that I only have the front and rear views as drawings;  does that mean that there were no end-view drawings available?  I have been searching around for the John Minnis book, South East & Chatham Railway;  Amazon has a copy, but at a much higher price than I am willing to pay. There is no sign of it in Oxfordshire Libraries or the Oxfam website.  I'm reluctant to go for the copy found on ebay, in case the book does not have the views I lack.

I’m a bit surprised that you had to look elsewhere for the rest of the drawings for Wateringbury as they were all part of the PM I sent you. I also don’t see why you think Adisham is too long, as the coloured up drawing I submitted above shows that the basic building is quite compact, and it would be easy to omit some of the outbuildings if you run out of space.

6 hours ago, AyJay said:

Bingo!

A further search on the internet revealed a website 'archive.org' that has a copy of the John Minnis book.

Logging in, I was able to check out the book and it does indeed have the end views of Wateringbury.

So I took copies of the pages I needed, attached. What is missing is a plan view.  So my next step will be to dig out my printer and look into how I get them working together.    Assuming I can get printouts, I will then look them over closely and see If I can produce a plan view from what the four side views tell me.

 

[AyJay]

My mistake Nick.  The other two are too long.  Adisham is rendered and painted all white.  Of course, I could just overlook this and do it red brick anyway.  Also, when I look at my print for Much Wenlock, I can see that there is a passenger entrance on the platform side where the waiting room is; but on the roadside, the only entrance is for the stationmasters residence.  Where I would expect an entrance, it's all windows?

[Nick Holliday]

37 minutes ago, AyJay said:

My mistake Nick.  The other two are too long.  Adisham is rendered and painted all white.  Of course, I could just overlook this and do it red brick anyway.  Also, when I look at my print for Much Wenlock, I can see that there is a passenger entrance on the platform side where the waiting room is; but on the roadside, the only entrance is for the stationmasters residence.  Where I would expect an entrance, it's all windows?

The logical location would be in the centre of the wall to the ticket office, where the drawing shows a plain window which is patently not the original.  The last page (127) of the book has a photo of the refurbished building, which has a doorway in the same place, although that is no guarantee as to its original location.

[AyJay]

I may have just found my station.

The next step is to get cutting cereal boxes and make a mock-up.

[AyJay]

I'm not yet sure how far I want to take this one.

Having decided that I want to model the Arley Station building that is on the Severn Valley Railway, although that's not what it's going to be called on my layout, I have just noticed the colour of the bricks. They are a yellow/sandstone colour. The Scale Model Scenery website describes a matching brickpaper as 'Yellow London Brick'  (I'm looking at item TX262-OO)

Aside from my castle, which is stone,  all of my buildings are red brick.

I'm assuming that all of the bricks used in an area should be the same approximate colour because you generally don't carry building material from a distant location, you use what is locally sourced.

So my question is, would it be unusual for a station to be built out of bricks that are a different colour to the bricks used in other buildings of a similar era, in that area?

 

Consistency says that I should make it in red brick.

Thank you

[KingEdwardII]

On 09/03/2024 at 16:01, AyJay said:

you generally don't carry building material from a distant location,

Ahem, funnily enough it was the railways themselves that changed this during the Victorian period. Railways enabled low-cost transportation of heavy materials like bricks and the development of large scale production in a few favoured locations. Bricks could come from Bedford, Peterborough and so on by the million. And of course, the railways were also consumers of vast numbers of bricks too.

 

Not to say that there was not local production, rather that imported materials became much more significant. Also, mechanisation of the production processes tended to favour the larger concerns.

 

Yours, Mike.

[Nick Holliday]

Although brickworks such as at Fletton were established in the 1870’s the mass mechanical production didn’t really start until the 1920’s, so until then more local production would hold sway. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the majority of station buildings such as at Arley were built at the same time as the railway, around 1866, so rail transport might not be particularly effective. On many railway building projects, the contractors established small brickworks if they came across suitable clay, The colour of the resulting bricks would probably match other locally prepared wares used in non-railway buildings.

[AyJay]

Red brick it is then!

Thank you for listening to my doubts.

[AyJay]

Well that's the outer shell of my new station complete.

The next step is to make the windows and doors. Once the windows and doors are in, I can then add the internal detailing.

After that, I can close off the ceilings, add interior lighting, close off the floors, make the bay window, add chimneys, roofing, guttering, window sills and external detailing.

 

Looking closely at google earth, I realised that attached to the Stationmasters house on the other side, is a small garden.  I won't be able to model this, because I am placing the station in a townscent and it faces a busy entranceway, so a quiet garden would look out of place.

I also realised that passenger entrance from the road is not through the booking hall. Passengers walk round the end of the station and enter the booking hall from the platform side. Nice to know.

Edited April 5 by AyJay
Added photo

[AyJay]

Here’s an update on my progress. Inspired by what I read in the book ‘Cottage Modelling for Pendon, by Chris Pilton, I decided to copy the technique for making windows for the sash windows that I needed. Having carved one group out of thin card, I decided to make the second group, displayed, out of 0.25mm plasticard for a neater cut. Having fitted the sash windows, I then turned my attention to the booking hall interior. Information here was limited, but in a book I bought on Arlen Station, I did find one black & white photograph of the interior view of one end of the hall. Fabricating the interior took all day and it was fortunate that I had already bought a stock of station posters. My next task is to bake the ticket office, which is next door. I will also need to fit lights inside.

[AyJay]

Sorry. My next task is to make the ticket office. This is not Bake-off 🤭

[AyJay]

This is the result of five hours effort yesterday. Work on the bay window has started.

[AyJay]

Here’s my progression of the bay window. I first used thin card to provide a base for the roof and glued thin wire on to provide the ridges.

Then turning to the lead flashing against the wall, I took a sheet of 80g paper, cut it to shape (very fiddly, needed a new blade for this). Gave it a coat of Matt black acrylic, followed by a very light brushing with some steel coloured paint I had in my Games Workshop range.  After gluing it in place (carefully using tweezers to move it in place) using some clear PVA that I found in ‘The Works’, I then repeated the process with completing the roof covering. Note, when looking at the original on StreetView, I was surprised to see that the roof is lead and there is no gutter (one less job to worry about). My next task is to decide how to build the four chimneys?

[AyJay]

That’s the last chimney made.

I fabricated it by gluing together some wooden drinks stirrers and planing them to size.

Then I faced the structure with card glued in place with PVA.

The exposed cement is card and filler painted in grey, then dry brushed with black acrylic.

As for the brick paper coating, I first did a practise run with white paper, cutting it to the shape I wanted to wrap around the chimney. For my brick paper, having cut out the right shape, I first painted over the exposed white edges before gluing it in place.

Having completed the chimney, I glued it in place on the building, standing it on a sheet of glass and using a set square to check that it was vertical.

The chimney pots will be one of the last things that I add, because they are exposed. Next comes the roof.

[AyJay]

Here's something that I have been putting off for ages, but now which I can ignore no longer.

The prototype which my model is based upon, has a course of something, cement moulding/concrete slab, protruding at first floor window level around the building.  It looks two brick courses high and protrudes no more than 3 inches.  This is visible in the attached streetview link (if it displays)  Where each window is, it also serves as the windowsill.

 

Now the original is in sandstone/Cotswold coloured brick, whereas my model is red brick.  This decision was discussed earlier, so I don't want to comment on it further.

 

To model this as is, would be simple; cut a thin strip of card, colour appropriately and glue in place. 

However, I would like to know what it's there for? Is it cosmetic, or is it to keep rainwater runoff off the wall below.  Also, If I model it as proposed, in  stone/cement colour, will it look out of place on a red brick structure?  I'm beginning to feel a bit lethargic and could really do without the fuss of wrapping brick paper around thin strips of card.

 

Does anyone know what would be done here?  Thanks.

 

https://www.instantstreetview.com/@52.417059,-2.348269,219.88h,3.38p,1.29z,CAoSLEFGMVFpcE02T1NZYkFzcEhDdGdCZ19SaGdNTTNoTWRpX29YeEFuTm9iSHM3

[VIA185]

On 27/12/2023 at 19:32, rovex said:

I suspect your Much Wenlock drawings come from this book.

Assuming the drawings haven't been enlarged or shrunk there are drawn at 2mm:1ft

The drawing of Much Wenlock which appeared in my book was drawn by Adrian Knowles (he and I are both fans of that particular architectural style) who has since produced his own book on the Wellington-Craven Arms line with lots more drawings of that railway's buildings. They certainly were not drawn at 2mm:1ft - to draw decent drawings in that scale would be almost impossible. Drawings are always done to a larger scale and reduced for publication. In that case 2mm:1ft was the largest scale that would allow them to fit on a page. I was very keen that all the drawings in the book should be published at recognised modelling scales rather than just randomly shrunk to fit the page, which was common practice at the time. (CJL)

[AyJay]

Thank you for that insight, Via185, it tells me that I must not take drawings in books on trust.

However, I rejected Much Wenlock, my prototype is Arley Station on the Severn Valley Railway, with a couple of minor changes.

[VIA185]

Arley, or a generic Severn Valley station was offered in either Hornby or Bachmann's resin-cast range. The designer was the same chap who did Much Wenlock, whose name escapes me at present. (CJL)